The TeV Scale: A Threshold to New Physics?

After the discovery of the Higgs boson, the SM of particle physics is theoretically complete, nevertheless it leaves many questions unanswered. Most important of those are the naturalness of the electroweak scale, the nature of dark matter, the origin of matter in the Universe and the structure of flavor.

Experimentally, data from Run 2 of the LHC will give us a good idea of what can be expected from the experiments in the long run: by the summer of 2017 either there will already be a discovery of new physics or some significant deviations from SM expectations, or one will have to start facing the fact that new physics might remain invisible at 13/14 TeV hadron colliders. At the same time the Xenon 1T experiment will push the frontier of Dark Matter direct detection closer towards the neutrino floor, Planck legacy results will be known, and the first data of Belle II might be on their way. In addition, the physics cases for future colliders like FCC, CepC, SppC will already be well studied at that point. This makes 2017 an ideal time to pause and to critically reassess the status of new physics in light of these anticipated new results and to brainstorm about new ideas by bringing together experts from all areas of BSM physics. Potential discoveries will be analyzed in particular regarding their impact on naturalness, dark matter and flavor. In the absence of convincing new signals, we will discuss new strategies to uncover natural models of the electroweak scale, like the MSSM and composite Higgs models, or whether they should be abandoned in favour of more elusive "neutral naturalness" scenarios like relaxion and twin Higgs.

An expected outcome of this Scientific Program is a recommendation for future strategies to explore TeV scale new physics, and how to optimize the complementarity of energy and precision frontier. The outcome will certainly provide useful input for the next European Strategy meeting in 2017/2018.